Moisei Vainberg is a somewhat enigmatic figure in Russian musical life. He eludes English (though not American) reference books; in the 1966 one-volume Russian music dictionary he gets two factual lines before a worklist, but a picture; in the five-volume Russian dictionary (1973) there is a picture of what looks like a younger man accompanying a text calling him "one of the most outstanding Soviet composers". He was officially praised by Tikhon Khrennikov for having seen the error of ways that included overdoing the Jewish element in his music, then briefly arrested in 1953.

He was born in Warsaw in 1919, and studied there and in Minsk; Jan Pekker's book on Uzbek opera records him collaborating in what sounds like rather a thin opera in Tashkent in 1942; he settled (if you can call it that) in Moscow in 1943. His long worklist includes more operas (including one on The Three Musketeers), ballets, string quartets and 19 symphonies. This 1962 symphony is under the shadow of Shostakovich, rather too much so for its own good. There is a spacious opening movement, with outstanding orchestration, by turns aloof and sardonic, a brooding, pain-racked Adagio, and a pawky scherzo leading to a finale that ends on an almost clown-like gesture. But it is skilfully constructed, engagingly invented, and impressive enough to have earned this careful, devoted performance from its dedicatee. The Trumpet Concerto of 1968 impressed Shostakovich, as well it might when he heard so wittily applied his own technique of unexplained quotations here, Mendelssohn's Wedding March, a military fanfare, and the opening of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel. Who knows what they all mean; but the piece is an entertaining addition to the trumpet repertory.

JW
(From: Gramophone, February 1994)